Michelle Hardy
A Review of:
If You Lie Down in a Field, She Will Find You There
Colleen BrownRadiant Press, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-98927-494-1
110 pages
$20.00 CAD
Remembering an Unremarkable Woman:
Colleen Brown will not allow memories of her “perfectly human and unremarkable” mother to be overshadowed by the “spectacle of her murder.” Brown’s memoir If You Lie Down in a Field, She Will Find You There, published by Radiant Press in 2023, investigates the story of her mother’s life. Only eight years old when Doris Brown died, Colleen Brown consolidates her own childhood memories with present-day adult interviews of her siblings and cousins, as well as with an essay written by her sister Laura twenty-five years ago. In the opening pages of her book, Brown admits that when younger, the only way she could attribute meaning to her mother’s life was to “willfully excise her death.” Now, Brown writes to understand the whole of her mother’s existence. During the process of remembering, this author’s childhood recollections create new interpretations of her family’s past.
Colleen Brown is an artist, primarily a sculptor, and this memoir is her first book. Brown chose to shape this work of creative nonfiction into modular sections of varying lengths. Narrator sections are untitled, while sections attributed to the memories of each of the five siblings are headlined by their first names. As writer, artist, and subject, Colleen Brown occupies all possible points of view in this text.
Brown is the first-person narrator as well as first-person Colleen, youngest sibling residing within the home. Also, Brown’s siblings refer to her in the second and third person when they speak to and about their youngest sister in interviews conducted for her book. The author is everywhere on the page yet often nowhere in the history; twenty years younger than her oldest sister, many family memories were created before Colleen was born. Sibling anecdotes and conversation snippets provide the colour and texture Brown needs to write about family events and circumstances she did not directly observe. Her brothers and sisters’ stories fuse with Brown’s own childhood memories to evoke images of her mother’s care. The result is a memoir in which Brown’s adept handling of language blends with innate artistic ability to push past the narrative pull of true-crime blockbuster into the aesthetic realm of literature.
Texture plays a large but subtle role in Brown’s memories of her mother. For example, she recalls her mother’s bedspread: thin sage-coloured cotton covered in chenille popcorn tufts. Looking back now on the memory of that fabric, Brown writes:
“Thinking about this weak backing having to support the regime of gridded chirpy pom-poms makes me feel slightly sick.”
The author’s present-day queasiness, at the recollection of her childhood mother’s bed, does as much heavy lifting as the tiny squiggles used to separate certain small but graphic blocks of text. These hard-break symbols, far more explicit than the description of a bedspread or the memoir’s gentle poetic spacing, warn readers to stop. To contemplate violent realities that create temporal and logical disconnects within Brown’s story. Not only are references to violence bracketed by these hard-break symbols, but also the syntax of the references is clipped and direct. These sentences stand alone. They are kept separate from descriptions of Colleen Brown’s mother, her family, and their life. What skill and authorial guts. To convey the weight of violence within this story while giving little time and space to heavy, morbid detail.
My favourite passages from this book contemplate the connection between language and violence. Specifically, language is examined in terms of its relationship to the buttons on the Brown’s new 1970s blender. Each button had a unique name young Colleen could neither read nor understand:
“The violence of chop and crush beside the whimsy of whip and puree, finished off by a horrifying liquify.”
After Colleen’s sister Laura carefully shows her “the inside where the blades spin to invisibility,” Colleen, even at her young age, remembers characterizing the text of the blender buttons as “flim-flam.” Too big of a gulf between “the actual mechanics of the machine and all the language” represented, she recalls. Skip now, past the blender metaphor, to the memoir’s end when narrator Colleen theorizes “a violent death contains narrative dark matter…do not touch.” In other words, language describing violence may initially exert a gravitational pull. But those same words become devoid of meaning when applied to someone’s life story.
Colleen Brown hypothesizes she would have been a different person had her mother lived. She also admits they may not have liked one another as adults had her childhood mother been permitted the opportunity to age. This kind of honest, raw self-examination is the real subject of memoir. Images of bedspreads and blenders aside, what kind of woman was Doris Brown? Colleen writes:
“Family and friends have used larger cultural narratives to place her in history and explain her to me at different points in my life. The most common contexts reached for are feminism, economics, and justice.”
But Colleen Brown has an artist’s eye. So, she weaves these strands of ideology with her family’s memories of colour, shape, and specificity. Eventually the whole texture unifies, and it’s more than a statistic. It’s a woman, a real woman who existed in time and space.
Some components of the book felt unexpected or difficult to process. Uncaptioned photographs caught me off guard, despite the text’s detailed bibliography. And I found Laura’s interaction with her mother’s murderer in the psychiatric ward unsettling. But I think this says more about my own contemporary-media-shaped expectations than any deficiency in the writing. The pronoun shifts caused a minute amount of confusion. But overall, the multiple voices, style, tone, and structural setup worked for me. Readers should also visit https://colleenvbrown.org/ to view the author/artist’s same-titled art exhibition; the images posted there relate directly to this memoir.
The title If You Lie Down in a Field, She Will Find You There evokes both haunting threat and comforting reassurance. Despite the heartache it induces in me, I find Colleen Brown’s memoir quiet and restful. This true-crime story is not a plot-driven thriller. However, it does contain momentum as readers strive to comprehend: what happened to this woman? And in a broader sense, how has her daughter coped? Colleen Brown’s memoir subordinates her mother’s murder to her unremarkable life, and by doing so underscores that death was not the conclusion to Doris Brown’s story.